Cho Duck Hyun (b.1957) is known for his drawings in pencils that resemble black and white photographs, and installation works based on the drawings. Cho reconstructs the vestiges of the past through his artworks and focuses on the existence and fate of individuals within the larger Korean modern history.

Through his “photo-like paintings,” which are so sophisticated that it’s hard to tell whether they are photographs or paintings, the artist revives a family’s history or creates new stories based on fictional histories. The artist has also been actively trying to collaborate with other genres such as literature, history, and music for a long time.

In the 90s, Cho Duck Hyun worked on referencing 20th century photographs. The Memory of the Twentieth Century series references photographs that allude to major events in Korea’s modern and contemporary history, photographs of unknown people, and photographs of the artist’s own family history, which he paints with extreme delicacy and precision on canvas.

This work presents Cho’s unique style (or method) of combining black box and photo-like images. The canvas, placed like a screen in the center of a three-dimensional black box, creates the illusion that the audience is in a small movie theater. In addition to the cinema-like installation, he adds sculptural elements such as flowers and ship models to extend the work beyond the canvas. Cho’s thematic interest in highlighting our history and the lives of the people who lived through it is reinforced by the colorful installation.

In the 2000s, he presented pieces that addressed the history of specific figures. For example, The Nora Collection is a project in the form of a collection based on the experiences and memories of Nora Noh, Korea’s first fashion designer, and Joeong Shun Lee, British Dowager Viscountess Rothemere.

For his solo exhibition “Re-collection” at the Kukje Gallery in 2008, where this work was shown, the artist collected photographs of the two women and their families and then reinterpreted them as pencil drawings. These installations invite the audience to re-collect the history of the figures he has collected.

Later, Cho’s practice of translating photographs into drawings came into contact with an excavation project. Initiated at the 1994 São Paulo Biennial, Dark Water: The Antipodes Project tells the fictional story of a container box that originates in South Korea and is transported across the ocean to be excavated in various locations around the world.

The work was then part of a series of public sculptures, Living Room 09: My heart is where my home is, which began in Auckland, New Zealand, and concluded in Dunedin. In New Zealand, Dark Water: The Antipodes Project a container was submerged for two days and then dredged from Auckland harbor and upon opening revealed a series of framed photo-realist portraits produced by the artist.

The container, which is like a “Wunderkammer”, contains paintings based on anonymous photographs of weddings from the past that the artist found in the photographic archives at Auckland City Library. The history of the photographs, buried in the library, is revived through the artist’s storytelling practice, traveling across oceans and around the world to be reinterpreted by different audiences.

In Dream, which was presented in a solo exhibition at the Ilmin Museum of Art in 2015, the artist explores how personal narratives can symbolize macro-history through a fictional character. The artist began by creating a fictional character, Cho Duck Hyun (1914-1995), and tracing his life through modern and contemporary Korean history.

In order to access the life and dreams of the man with the same name as himself, the artist set up a detailed fictional history and created photographs, objects, and videos of the protagonist, organizing the exhibition as a space to imagine the life of a single character.

Furthermore, the artist collaborated with novelist Kim Ki Chang to write a short story about the life of the fictional character Cho Duck Hyun. A scene from the novel was photographed by actor Cho Duck Hyun, who shares the same name as the artist. Through this elaborate setup, the life of the fictional character acts as a mirror to the modern history of Korea.

His recent work, Flashforward, is a large-scale acrylic painting spanning 10 meters, juxtaposing events from different time periods in a single space and time, as if to demonstrate cinematography or theater. Composed of 15 canvases, the work is a mix of histories, including the ruins of Palmyra, Syria, the medieval Last Supper, the New York Civil Rights Movement, and the Hong Kong protests.

The process of compressing a wide range of time and space into one is comparable to the ‘compositing’ of the digital age, but the thinness, unfamiliarity, and fearfulness characteristic of such composites are overcome by the attitude of painting. In addition, by reproducing the various histories with color paintings using acrylic paints rather than black and white paintings using pencil or conté, which Cho has mainly shown, the history and stories contained in the images are more intensely revealed.

In this way, Cho’s paintings have become a kind of circuit from individual history to community history and from the past to the future by re-excavating the fading memories and traces of the past and connecting them to the present.

“I don’t think the past is a separate time from the present, but rather the two tenses move forward in close contact and interlock. The present is a time that is very quickly incorporated into the past, so life as we perceive it is based on the past, and the time that flows into the past is directed toward the repository of memory, and that stored memory is recalled at the request of the present.” (Noblesse, Interview with Cho Duck Hyun, September 2, 2015)

Cho Duck Hyun has held various solo shows at different institutions including the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia, USA) and National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul, Korea). Cho was invited to international art events such as Sao Paulo Biennale, Istanbul Biennale, and Gwangju Biennale, making an early debut at the global art stage.

Cho received the 2nd Korea-France Culture Award in 2001 and received Lee In-Seong Academy Award in 2019. His works are in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum (Washington D.C., USA), Fukuoka Art Museum (Fukuoka, Japan), Gorinchem city hall (Gorinchem, Netherlands) and Leeum Samsung Museum of Art (Seoul, Korea). Cho is currently a professor at the College of Fine Art & Design at the Ewha Woman’s University.

References

• 조덕현, PKM 갤러리 (Cho Duck Hyun, PKM Gallery)
• 일민미술관, 조덕현 개인전 — 꿈 (Ilmin Museum of Art, Cho Duck Hyun Solo Exhibition— Dream)
• 국립현대미술관, 조덕현 | 20세기의 추억 | 1994 (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, CHO Duckhyun | Memory of the Twentieth Century | 1994)
• 더니든 공공미술관, Dark Water: The Antipodes Project (Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Dark Water: The Antipodes Project)
• 대구미술관, 제20회 이인성미술상 수상전 ‘조덕현: 그대에게’ (Daegu Art Museum, Cho Duck Hyun: to thee)
• 노블레스, 꿈의 서사, 2015.09.02